Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 16

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.
Alistair Urquhart
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
Iain Banks
As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.
George MacDonald
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?
Robert Louis Stevenson
I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do.""The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.
Iain Banks
...with a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.
Robert Louis Stevenson
He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?
Ali Smith
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
Iain M. Banks
The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.
George MacDonald
Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir
There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone...Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with Him.
Oswald Chambers
Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.
Ali Smith
We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. But what about the devil-possessed world? Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.
Oswald Chambers
He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.
Aminatta Forna
So I sang out the barbarous words - karaoke from Hell.
Grant Morrison
It must not be thought, however, that in pagan Ireland Fairyland was altogether conceived as a Hades or place of the dead. We have already seen that in some of its types and aspects it was inherently nothing of the sort; as when, for example, it came to be confused with the Land of the Gods. In all likelihood these separate paradises and deadlands of a nature so various were the result of the stratified beliefs of successive races dwelling in the same region. A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. The gods of vanquished races might be conceived as presiding over spheres of the dead for which their victors would have nothing but contempt, and which, because of that very contempt, might come to be conceived as hells or places of a debased and grovelling kind, pestiferous regions which only the spirits of despised "natives" or the undesirable might inhabit.
Lewis Spence
To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.
George MacDonald
English is so past,’ she said. ‘Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don’t have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don’t believe any of it – that would be useful.
Ken MacLeod
Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.
George MacDonald
At heart men are antagonistic to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not antagonism to creeds or points of view, but antagonism encountered for My sake. Many of us awaken antagonism by our way of stating things; we have to distinguish between being persecuted for some notion of our own and being persecuted “for My sake.
Oswald Chambers
The most perfect happiness, surely, must arise from the contemplation of the most perfect object.
David Hume
The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.
Jack Bruce
Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here . . . it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.
Irvine Welsh
...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...
Sir Walter Scott
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
Alexander Fraser Tytler
One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.
Sara Sheridan
You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.
David Hume
The law don’t like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.
Sara Sheridan
I once was a stranger to grace and to God,I knew not my danger, and felt not my load;Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.I oft read with pleasure, to sooth or engage,Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;But e’en when they pictured the blood sprinkled treeJehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.Like tears from the daughters of Zion that roll,I wept when the waters went over His soul;Yet thought not that my sins had nailed to the treeJehovah Tsidkenu—’twas nothing to me.When free grace awoke me, by light from on high,Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;No refuge, no safety in self could I see—Jehovah Tsidkenu my Saviour must be.My terrors all vanished before the sweet Name;My guilty fears banished, with boldness I cameTo drink at the fountain, life giving and free—Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.Jehovah Tsidkenu! my treasure and boast,Jehovah Tsidkenu! I ne’er can be lost;In Thee I shall conquer by flood and by field,My cable, my anchor, my breast-plate and shield! Even treading the valley, the shadow of death,This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,Jehovah Tsidkenu, my death song shall be.
Robert Murray McCheyne
Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufactures, inshort, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.
Adam Smith
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
Robert Louis Stevenson
She had turned thought and feeling into life, into reality, into creation. They speak of the _creations_ of the human intellect, of the human imagination! there is nothing man can do comes half so near the making of the Maker as the ordering of his way--except one thing: the highest creation of which man is capable, is to will the will of the Father. That _has_ in it an element of the purely creative, and then is man likest God. But simply to do what we ought, is an altogether higher, diviner, more potent, more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the most worshiping temple, dream out the most enchanting commotion of melody and harmony.
George MacDonald
The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator. He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself.
George MacDonald
I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come.
Morag Joss
Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.
Iain Banks
It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies.
George MacDonald
When I get home I take some sleeping pills and within what seemed like half an hour of unconsciousness it was Monday morning again.
Irvine Welsh
It is so delightful to teach those one loves!
Andrew Lang
Giving out of your surplus does not make you generous, it makes your selfishness more tolerable! Giving while you are lacking is what pleases the Lord.
William Branks
It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door")
Mrs. Oliphant
All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.
Iain Banks
The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.
Sara Sheridan
I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.
Sara Sheridan
I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.
Sara Sheridan
Love me, beloved; Hades and DeathShall vanish away like a frosty breath;These hands, that now are at home in thine,Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine;And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride,In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide,If the truest love thy heart can knowMeet the truest love that from mine can flow.Pray God, beloved, for thee and me,That our souls may be wedded eternally
George MacDonald
We have long laboured under an obtuse presupposition that the senses by which other living creatures perceive their world must to a great extent resemble our own; but in fact we are, by scientific invention, only now beginning to approach methods of perception that the whales have always owned as their birthright.
Gavin Maxwell
Sometimes a person’s first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.
Sara Sheridan
People see what they expect to see.
Sara Sheridan
O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.
Robert Burns
New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.
Sara Sheridan
How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result
George MacDonald
ThatNeed to knowYour enemyTo surviveIs bitter.
Maud Sulter
I wish to be buried in Ireland, the country of my adoption a country which I loved, which I have dutifully served, and for which I believe I have sacrificed my life.
Thomas Drummond